Based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by A.S. Byatt, Possession
should be a rapturous, romantic film about an ancient passion
so intense that it transcends historical boundaries. It should
be, but it isn't. It's mostly a dry, lifeless affair more concerned
with exaggerating the differences between British people and Americans
than establishing any kind of emotional resonance. Directed by
Neil LaBute, it stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart as a couple
of scholars who unearth letters revealing an illicit love affair
between two 19th century poets (played in ongoing flashbacks by
Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle). The whole idea is that the
fiery, secret affair between these two long-dead writers infects
the present-day scholars in a way they didn't expect, igniting
a similar passion between them. But director LaBute, while crafting
a remarkably detailed setting for the 1859 love affair, has left
his present-day actors cold, forcing Paltrow and Eckhart to find
their way around forced dialogue (penned by writers David Henry
Hwang and Laura Jones, who adapted the screenplay), trying vainly
to search for some romantic feeling which, to be truthful, never
properly develops between them.

Despite some rather irrelevant and tedious intrigue concerning
various supporting characters who try to beat our protagonists
to the discovery, this story is mainly about four people. Two
of them, living in present-day London, are Roland Michell (Eckhart),
a devoted American scholar of 19th-c. British poet laureate Randolph
Henry Ash, and Maud Bailey, the great-great-great-niece of another
English writer of the same period, Christabel LaMotte, whose life
and work she studies with a similar enthusiasm. The other two,
of course, are the writers themselves, whose clandestine love
affair is played out before our eyes even as our modern-day researchers
discover it. It begins when Roland finds two antique letters in
a book in the London library, a book that once was in Ash's possession.
Their contents, which hint at the affair, lead him to Maud, who
at first looks upon his hunch as a ridiculous "goose chase"
(especially since her aunt Christabel was supposedly involved
in a lesbian love affair at the time), but is inexorably drawn
into agreement with him as they unravel more clues and discover
more letters. And as they become closer to the truth, they also
become closer to each other, in every way.

This is all fine, of course, but the way Roland's and Maud's
characters are drawn, simplistic and stereotypical, tends to erode
the believability of the modern-day portion from the very beginning.
Roland, the American, is boorish, good-looking, and about as scholarly
as a wide receiver. Paltrow's character, on the other hand, is
an icy British snob who wears her long blonde hair pulled back
in a painful-looking bun and appears embarrassed even to be seen
speaking to an American. Word has it that Roland's character is
originally British in the book and the screenwriters made him
American, but regardless of this their relationship is without
chemistry from the start, when they're both rolling their eyes
at each others' nationalistic quirks, to the end, when they're
supposed to be falling in love. Although the period scenes of
this movie are nicely rendered and honestly acted by Northam and
Ehle, the modern-day part is really what the story is about, and
it is not well-enough supported to really succeed as it should.
***½